You ever have a crazy intense epic dream and come up with this awesome new idea that you think will change the world, and after a minute or two of being awake and coming to your senses, you realize how utterly idiotic you sound? There's going to be a lot of that.
Probably. I have been able to lucid dream since I was a kid, if we're talking about knowing you are dreaming and controlling aspects of the dream.
It's still just your own brain, and if you're controlling it you're actually being less outside-the-box creative than in the dreams where you're not.
If you're so in control you're able to force it to do work tasks then what's going to be generated will probably be lower quality than waking tasks, not higher.
Have you ever had a dream that you, you had, your, you could, you’ll do, you wants, you could do so, you’ll do, you could, you want, you want him to do you so much you could do anything?
And no tooling will certainly improve the coding abilities. Especially since I remember all the code, including the changes others made in the time since I last looked at it.
When I was twelve, I woke up convinced that the color yellow was called yellow, because humans had figured out that word was intrinsically linked to that color.
I was devastated my "epiphany" stopped making sense after I fully woke up.
I sometimes lucid dream, something tips me off that it's not real, and then I can take some control. Mostly I like flying, but sometimes I go full crimefighting superhero.
Realizing you are in a dream world and deciding to work, is like winning a billion dollars and deciding to spend it all on a nice car somehow. What a boring waste.
Third comment in this post about this from me, but I’ve done university work while lucid dreaming, solved bugs we didn’t even know existed, stuff like that. I don’t think you rest as much while lucid dreaming, I’m pretty sure I built up fatigue at many points in my life just due to how much lucid dreaming I was doing. I now avoid lucid dreaming, and have started losing the ability to do it frequently (which frankly is a blessing). I feel more well rested now than I did when I lucid dreamt a lot. No way this idea doesn’t just leave you completely tired after a while.
I was sitting here thinking how useful a loop to count bananas before running out of time and losing my shoes and or pants before realizing I’m in a large college auditorium and everyone is laughing at me would be!
I posted this in another comment, but during uni I did in fact write code in lucid dreams. A friend can vouch for a specific time when I woke up from sleep during an all nighter, to fix a very specific bug (which I just remembered, we didn’t even know it existed), then went back to sleep. On another occasion, I designed a recursive path-finding algorithm to replace djikstra’s algorithm, all in my sleep.
It definitely can be done (though I doubt it could be done consistently and without actually imagining shit up), but it really shouldn’t be done, I really doubt I was really resting while doing that.
I have a lot of lucid dreams, and they’re often in a specific city, and sometimes I even go to work in these dreams. I haven’t lived in a city and worked in an office in over 10 years, so it’s some kind of reverse escapism. I can always leave, and weird stuff happens anyway. I wouldn’t trust any of my work output there.
But to let a company try to take over your dreams and never let you escape, you need to stand up and fight that shit. Put them in a never-ending nightmare where nobody gives them money.
This is stupid for a wide variety of reasons, but one of the more interesting ones is that text is notoriously inconsistent in dreams.
A very common “reality check” to see if you’re dreaming is to look at a clock or text, look away, and look back. The time/text will nearly always change.
So explain to me how they expect COMPUTER CODE to work?
I became obsessed with lucid dreaming after seeing the Waking Life movie, around when I started high school, and yeah that’s one of the things I used to induce them. Kept a dream journal and had a digital watch that I would always look at, light switches etc. I did have lucid dreams but never got really good at it and eventually just neglected the practice… about when I started having real life sex LOL
I never got into dream journaling but frequent reality checks and practicing meditation was pretty effective for me. 100% of the time when I wake up from a lucid dream I get bad sleep paralysis where I feel like I’m suffocating, so I kinda fell out of the habit.
Well I never had that… that’s disturbing. I’d probably have about a lucid dream per week and it’s weird how it lost it’s novelty. Same thing happened with DMT for me where I more or less have the same trip every time.
i regularly have lucid dreams but i’m only able to turn it into a nightmare by spawning a demon or falling from a roof. and i get a sleep paralysis every single time. this happens about three times almost every night. it’s getting pretty lame by now.
If this is the same startup I read about a while ago… Well the technology doesn’t actually exist. There’s a vague suggestion that maybe lucid dreams could be induced through techniques that are not properly understood yet, and that’s about it.
Well FWIW there are somewhat reproducible techniques, I’ve used them, but I couldn’t tell you how I’ve used them if my life depended on it (honestly, brain chemical imbalances or fatigue might be a prerequisite). I actually got tired of lucid dreaming and started avoiding certain positions in bed, and started shifting around if I felt myself getting close to jumping into a lucid dream during hypnagogia.
I also worked on university assignments during lucid dreams, solved countless bugs in my code while asleep, a friend can even attest to it since one time I instantly woke up to solve a specific bug and then went back to sleep, with him right next to me (all nighters woo hoo).
It can be done. It really shouldn’t be done. The reason why I grew tired of lucid dreaming is because I didn’t feel like I was actually resting at all. That disconnect and peace that falling asleep gives you, it’s not there for me while lucid dreaming (at least not if I jumped in through hypnagogia).
I was often sent flying with no way to come back down. Went up fast. Not great for anxiety. The “focusing on stuff” trick does work, though if I overdid it I also woke up because I tried engaging my senses too much.
The tradeoff obviously will be that since you’re not actually getting rest, and all multicellular life needs to sleep, it’s going to fuck up a lot of engineers in ways we won’t find out about for like 5-10 years until they start going crazy/dying/whatever. But hey, people are infinitely replaceable commodities you can just burn through like trees, right?
I don’t know the answer to this, but I thought lucid dreaming still counted as getting rest as far as your brain was concerned. I lucid dream about once a month, and I never felt tired after it or like I was missing sleep.
@dogslayeggs no, the brain needs to cycle through four phases. REM only takes up a portion of your sleep. Even if it felt like you were dreaming all night, you likely weren't.
This is really a scam. A sleeping engineer cannot code in his dreams. This is not how the human body works. This guy is trying to scam ignorant venture capitals.
Similar to theranos. They exploit deep ignorance on biology of people who spent their life doing money
Hypothetical situation, if there was a way to induce lucid dreaming and record the dreams as well? Coding doesn’t really lend itself to this but advertising, filmography or architecture would benefit at least at the early concept stage.
I agree It’s all very sci-fi but if they can make a product that works like they say (sending ultrasounds to target specific parts of the brain to induce lucid dreaming), it has amazing entertainment value right out of the box regardless of its work use.
It’s like asking a computer in sleep mode to run a screen saver and pretending close-to-random loosely-guided images are result of a rational creative process. Sleeping brain work differently, for a reason. At that point they should put money on AI to improve awake productivity. Programming during lucid dreams is a scam
Regarding entertainment, there is a reason the humans needs to sleep. Disrupting natural patterns creates only issues
Just think: People having to get help because the job they quit three years ago keeps showing up in their dreams. What’s worse is that they keep doing it, in control but unaware of the fact that they aren’t getting paid, threatened by their in-dream former boss with being fired if the quota wasn’t met.
Staying awake yet unemployed becomes one of their only escapes. They turn to stimulants to stay away from ‘work’ just a bit longer, just a little more peace.
But they then ‘crash’, falling asleep for almost a day, and starting a shift that feels like an eternity, Inception style.
Lucid dreaming is such a cool concept. The ability to mentally experience things in a truly boundless environment, untethered by laws of physics or standards of reality.
Why the fuck would you want to waste that experience on work?
I feel also the concept of “work” is viewed from employer/employee perspective, but I’d argue it should be viewed more from "useful” development one. Like reading a fiction book vs a non-fiction.
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